While Joe and Anne concentrated immediately on the meat of the new challenge (and very meaty it was), Stuart couldn’t help getting distracted again by a couple more obvious anomalies.
Funnily enough Brendan there's quite a bit of stuff this month about Stuart going down some 'blind alleys' of his own, your comment is almost 'spooky' in the way it foreshadows that.
Thanks again for persisting, and proving the clue was ultimately solvable, I suspect you'll be able to get this chapter's 'challenge' without quite as much angst.
If my own experience with this challenge is anything to go by, the main difference from how it was solved by Stuart and family was that they did not spend hours and days going up blind alleys because of the (deliberate) vagueness of the clues... Apart from that I found the first two that they got also easy-ish and their final two very hard, and the first clue in the challenge probably impossible without a hint from Tim. For a while I was convinced that the second "ET clue" was "IL" because Cairo is a city in Illinois, USA and extroverts think about "I" and Vilnius is a capital with those letters in etc - pretty shaky stuff but that's where vague clues can take you - very disconcerting when you are used to cryptic crosswords!
But once you see the answers you know that you really have to think very laterally ! But perhaps writing about hours of blind alleys might not have been very good for the narrative..?
Funnily enough Brendan there's quite a bit of stuff this month about Stuart going down some 'blind alleys' of his own, your comment is almost 'spooky' in the way it foreshadows that.
Thanks again for persisting, and proving the clue was ultimately solvable, I suspect you'll be able to get this chapter's 'challenge' without quite as much angst.
Tim
If my own experience with this challenge is anything to go by, the main difference from how it was solved by Stuart and family was that they did not spend hours and days going up blind alleys because of the (deliberate) vagueness of the clues... Apart from that I found the first two that they got also easy-ish and their final two very hard, and the first clue in the challenge probably impossible without a hint from Tim. For a while I was convinced that the second "ET clue" was "IL" because Cairo is a city in Illinois, USA and extroverts think about "I" and Vilnius is a capital with those letters in etc - pretty shaky stuff but that's where vague clues can take you - very disconcerting when you are used to cryptic crosswords!
But once you see the answers you know that you really have to think very laterally ! But perhaps writing about hours of blind alleys might not have been very good for the narrative..?